1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatuses, and computer program products for managing virtual machine images in a distributed computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Modern computing systems can include a plurality of machines that share resources with each other. In a distributed computing environment, there are thousands of resources that can be entrusted in a distributed computing environment and accessed as a service. These resources are of various types and often belong to various environments of different types and reside on the hardware of the environment.